The decline of local news is a well-documented and long-standing issue. According to Northwestern University’s 2023 State of Local News report, nearly 2,900 newspapers have shuttered since 2005, leaving more than half of the nation’s counties with at most one local news outlet. These losses erode civic and community engagement, increase political polarization, and aid the transmission of misinformation, research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found.
In response, the University of Vermont (UVM), an ACE member, is stepping up by mobilizing student journalists to fill growing gaps in local coverage.
In 2019, UVM established the Community News Service (CNS). The program matches students with local papers, which assign students stories and publish their work. CNS enlists approximately 30 student journalists most semesters and 10 over the summer, giving them a hands-on journalism education.
“It’s a triple win, in a sense,” Richard Watts, CNS’s founder and a senior lecturer at UVM, told Inside Higher Ed. “It’s good for the students to have real stories that are published. It’s good for the universities, because many of us have a public service mission to give back. And it’s good for local news, the media ecosystem, which has really collapsed.”
CNS is offered as an internship for credit, and students may repeat it as many times as they want. In addition to their reporting assignments, first-time students take a class on fundamentals of journalism, including reporting techniques, interviewing skills, and writing structure. CNS journalists contribute to about 20 outlets, producing over 300 stories per year.
Student journalists cover topics ranging from arts and culture to the environment to sports to local government and elections. Most students are print journalists, but they can also practice audio journalism and photojournalism. An editor from UVM helps students refine their work so they can file complete, polished stories.
Rebecca Olshan, a former CNS reporter who graduated this spring, said she gained confidence in her journalistic abilities through her internship.
“I’ve just gotten so much experience through this program with feeling like I’m an independent reporter,” she told WCAX. She stressed the importance of having editors who were also her teachers, explaining that her “completely open communication” with them helped her develop her skills.
Building on CNS’s success, in 2022 Watts founded UVM’s Center for Community News (CCN), an organization dedicated to studying and promoting news-academic partnerships. Researchers at CCN have identified 120 such programs across the country.
“The concept was, ‘Let’s enable these programs to build a community, learn from each other, and see if we can motivate more institutions to give this experience to their students, and contribute to local news,’” Watts said.
CCN provides guidance and best practices to institutions considering partnering with local media. It also produces research on student reporting and partnerships between institutions and local news.
The center has several projects in progress for the short term, including a benchmark study on the national impact of student journalism and an effort to increase collaboration between institutions and public radio stations. In the long term, CCN’s leaders hope to triple the number of news-academic partnerships.
“We’re thinking bigger than just news sustainability with these partnerships,” CCN Managing Director Meg Little Reilly told UVM. “We want to cultivate trust in the next generation of engaged citizens, community leaders, news providers, and consumers.”
Photo courtesy of Anna Watts